Those Wild Wyndhams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power

and Souls women were, in general, notably slim).

Yet Poynter, himself not renowned for his sense of humour,

had failed to capture the essence of Mary, and the group to which she was integral. Her family thought the portrait far too solemn, capturing none of the ‘dancing gaiety’ of her eyes, or the swallow-like quickness of her movement.

In the flesh all the Souls – charismatic, mostly young and unusually good-looking – seemed simply to be having fun. Daisy Warwick considered them ‘more pagan than soulful’.

Lady Tweedsmuir described them as ‘a little suspect as not conforming to the rules of the social game’.

They were impossibly flirtatious with one another, while publicly advocating chastity. They were irreverent, renaming the group’s elder statesmen, the Cowpers, Brownlows and Pembrokes, ‘the Aunts’. Balfour, their lodestar, was ‘the adored Gazelle’. They loved games: ‘Clumps’, requiring participants to guess by questions abstractions like ‘the last straw’, ‘the eleventh hour’ or even ‘the last ball Mr Balfour drove into the [golf] bunker before lunch’; ‘Styles’, parodying well-known authors in prose or verse; ‘Epigrams’, inventing new ones; ‘Character Sketches’, describing someone present in terms of something else, such as a vegetable, building or colour.

Their patter was based on quick, inconsequential wit and a ready turn of phrase. Mary commented later of Harry Cust that ‘Before his fair neighbour had finished her soup she would find herself plunged into dissertations on eternity’, but normally this was accompanied by peals of laughter because, in the words of Lord Vansittart, Cust, a notable wit, was ‘as happy to stand on his head as on his dignity’.

Society was fascinated by them, ridiculed them and envied them in equal measure. ‘There is a “set” in this hotel who hate & abuse our “set” they call us “the Souls” … & say we are always laughing & that we read Herodotus & those sorts of crimes,’ reported D. D. (Edith) Lyttelton, Alfred Lyttelton’s second wife, while on a trip to Cairo.

This was inherent in the name bestowed upon them during the 1888 Season, although no one could recall exactly how it happened. In the spring, Mary attended a dinner party at Lord and Lady Brownlow’s house. The Gang engaged in their usual heated debate. ‘You all sit and talk about each other’s souls. I shall call you “the Souls”,’ said Lord Charles Beresford, an outsider, a courtier. Mary was sure that the quip – which no one thought very funny – was a well-rehearsed line, trundled out several times that season.

But it stuck, with all its undertones of mockery. The Souls always professed to hate it, and further denied being a clique at all.

Those denials convinced no one. In London, they were constantly in and out of one another’s houses. Outsiders finding themselves in the country at a house party of Souls often made their excuses and left: ‘either … they were bored with us or … they saw that we were bored with them’, Arthur said to Mary of Field Marshal Wolseley and his family, who left Wilton fully two days earlier than planned.

Conversely, at a house party held by the non-soul Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild at his magnificent Buckinghamshire château Waddesdon Manor, it was Mary and Charty Ribblesdale who retreated, to Mary’s room, ‘exhausted’ by the talk of their (non-Souls) fellow guests. They were soon joined by Hugo and his sister Hilda Brodrick, whereupon the intention that Charty should read Shelley aloud was abandoned in favour of an afternoon of vivacious chat and much ‘chaffing’ of Hugo.

Three weeks later, Mary, Daisy White, George Curzon and Hugo whiled away the train journey from London to the Pembrokes’ Wilton House in Wiltshire by learning poetry by heart; the following Sunday at the Cowpers’ Panshanger in Hertfordshire, a large number of the party, Mary included, decided to forgo church in favour of a morning in which ‘we sat out on the grass talking [about] … Dickens etc …’

– for the Souls, notwithstanding their name, did not share the previous generation’s religious fervour.

Given such proximity it is unsurprising that the Souls developed their own ‘ganglanguage’, incomprehensible to the outsider: ‘dentist’, a private meeting; ‘floater’, an embarrassing situation; ‘stodge’, the company of women; ‘flash’ or ‘sparkle’, the company of men.

The vocabulary is revealing, for a Souls gathering was quite different from the traditional, gender-stratified house party where men shot, women read, sewed and talked, and the two sexes united only briefly to eat: at damp outdoor lunches where the women joined the ‘guns’; in the drawing room at tea-time; and in the dining room at dinner, after which the women once more left the men, now to their port, smoking and billiards. The young niece of Lord Wenlock, whose wife Constance was a Soul, was startled when, attending a house party at the Wenlocks’ Escrick Park in Yorkshire that mixed Souls and their more conventional counterparts, she found that certain men including ‘Harry Cust, Evan Charteris, Doll Liddell … seemed to prefer the society of ladies and stayed at home on stormy or doubtful days, reading aloud to my aunt and her friends while they painted or modelled – or sometimes just talking, whimsically, wittily (as I know now, if I didn’t then) all day long’.

Women were the driving force behind the Souls, yet still they measured their social success by their impact upon the men of the group. If a rising political star (his own talents daily on show in the Commons to the press and strangers in the galleries above) talked to them for hours, it was a reflection of their own intellectual capacity, as well as their physical charm, for of course this talk was always amusing and flirtatious as well.

When writing of themselves in old age even the Souls struggled to recapture their evanescent charm, which was of the bon mot; behaviour that startled, but amused; a delightful but fundamentally unthreatening disregard for convention. Lady Violet Bonham Carter, daughter of Henry Asquith, and a child of the next generation, thought the Souls had a ‘liberating and civilising’ impact on Society, and she appreciated that ‘much of our fun and freedom was a direct heritage from them’.

The Souls’ benign rebellion pushed the boundaries. It did not breach them. The best illustration comes from one who was not a Soul. Intellectual, acerbic Lady Frances Balfour thought the Souls morally wanting, and far too frivolous. Her daughter Blanche Dugdale recorded her fury on returning from church at Whittingehame (Arthur’s East Lothian home) to find nine-year-old Blanche playing backgammon for half-crown stakes with Hugo.

Frances had visited Mells, Somerset home of the Horners. She described the scene at dinner to her sister-in-law Lady Betty, the wife of Gerald Balfour, another of Arthur’s brothers:

Lady Ribblesdale talking of a Peacock said it was a voluptuous bird, at which old Mrs Graham [Frances Horner’s mother] took exception and said ‘that word beginning with a “V” ought not to be mentioned’ I stood up for it and said it was what we all would be if we knew how, on which the old lady nearly fainted, and Lady Ribblesdale screamed with laughing, and asked the dear old soul if she would like to be if she knew how, and then there was a rapid proposal that a class should be formed and a Professor found (Lady Ribblesdale proposing Swinburne) to teach us the way wherein to walk. Wild nonsense but so refreshing I felt inclined to walk all round the room on my head.

Notwithstanding her fundamental disapproval, Frances recognized the group’s merit: ‘There is no doubt that with a hostess who understands how to manage them and with a real personality there is something very interesting in the “gang” … All these people have lived together through some of the great experiences and feelings of life, they know each other to the very core, and the absolute freedom and ease are delightful …’

At heart, this was a group of very good friends, competing fiercely in romance, politics, friendship. Only the Souls would read out ‘Collinses’, the effusive letters of thanks sent after each house party, from guests recently departed to ‘roars of mirth & groans of contempt’ from those remaining, as Mary, Ettie, Harry Cust and Harry White did one November day at Stanway in 1890. ‘We acted like traitors that afternoon!’ said Mary to Ettie, with a ‘crushing sense’ that her own letter was even at that moment being read out ‘as a sample of idiocy!’

Tiny, fascinating Ettie Fane, the Cowpers’ niece, drawn into the circle after her marriage to Willie Grenfell in 1887, was one of Mary’s and Arthur’s closest friends. ‘I feel really that you & I (& Laura [Lyttelton] who left so swiftly so long ago) stand very much for the souls [sic] – for we were really – the soul! & centre in a way of the elusive set,’ Mary wrote to Ettie in old age.

Privately, to Arthur, Mary called Ettie ‘Delilah’, crowing when Ettie, the least intellectually able (or interested) of the group, failed to grasp some point of debate.

Margot once challenged Balfour with not minding if Mary, Ettie and she all died. ‘I should mind if you all died on the same day’ was Balfour’s laconic response.

At twenty-three, George Wyndham, who had moved into the Gang’s orbit through Mary, scored a palpable hit when he secured the hand of the widowed, exceptionally beautiful Sibell, Countess Grosvenor, over a reported eighty rivals, including George Curzon. Sibell was nearly a decade older than George, a mother of three, and renowned for her indiscriminate warmth and sweetness.

When she clasped someone’s hand in her own soft one, said the Anglo-Irish hostess Elizabeth Fingall, it was never quite clear whether she knew whose hand it was.

Sibell had been charmed by George’s exuberant volubility and intense romanticism – the poet ‘riding to hounds across his prose, looking with wonder upon the world as upon a fairyland’, as T. S. Eliot described him

– and his dark, ‘French’ looks:

those of a troubadour according to Elizabeth Fingall, who added that George lived ‘every minute of his life at high pitch’.

In maturity, George earned the tired sobriquet of ‘the handsomest man in England’.

But it was possibly Madeline Wyndham’s old friendship with Sibell’s father-in-law, the Duke of Westminster, that made the Duke finally, reluctantly, agree to Sibell’s marrying the bumptious young man. He stipulated that Sibell maintain her title after marriage. It was unthinkable that the mother of his heir, Bend’Or, should be plain Mrs George Wyndham.

George’s unmistakably oedipal choice was regarded with misgivings by many who knew him. Alfred Lyttelton expressed concern about the effect on a ‘smart youth … very keen about his profession and about intellectual things … from a family where there is throughout an air of Bohemian quasi-culture’ of being ‘plunged into deadalike decorous ducal circles coldly hostile to him and all that produced his unstupid but ill-ballasted personality’.

George survived – but Sibell was no match intellectually for him. Soon enough he took up with Gay, Lady Plymouth, and conducted a contented lifelong affair.

EIGHT (#ulink_cd9d1d82-922a-5a3f-81cc-422b7ec7bb01)

The Summer of 1887 (#ulink_cd9d1d82-922a-5a3f-81cc-422b7ec7bb01)

In January 1887, while staying at Clouds, Mary realized to her horror that she was pregnant again. She chided ‘Naughty Wash’ for ‘pinting [sic] too soon after Betsey at Panshanger’,

breaking the news in a carrot-and-stick manner: ‘if ou comes veggy early! Migs will receive ou in cot & no more precautions needed, for Migs is quite certainly in the family way,’ she told him.

Hugo had been expected back several days before. Mary suspected, with good reason, that he had been delayed by another woman’s charms. She used the promise of sex to entice him back.

Mary was furious about being pregnant. Her younger son Guy was barely six months old. Mananai was due to be presented that spring. Mary had been looking forward to showing her younger sister the ropes in her first Season. Pregnancy required her to scale down her social activities. It made her feel fat, dull, unable to compete socially among her friends. The mid-Victorian days of ten or twelve children were past. Souls women, appreciating their figures, their health and their consuming social lives, did not have many children.

There were ways of achieving this. Carefully coded advertisements in women’s periodicals recommended purges of pennyroyal and compounds of aloe and iron that would restore an ailing young lady to her former good ‘health’. It seems that at least some of Mary’s friends employed these, but Mary decided that she ‘daren’t send for Zach’s stuff its too naughty’, and resigned herself to the inevitable:

‘Me looks forward to it [the pregnancy] with disgust & loathing … my season with Mad knocked on the head. Migs propose Pints dispose,’ she mourned.

Mary was still in her first trimester when she attended George and Sibell’s quiet marriage in the private chapel of the Westminsters’ Cheshire house, Eaton Hall. The service was conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Only immediate family on both sides attended. In what must have been a significant blow to George’s ego, The Times reported that the Countess Grosvenor had married Guy Wyndham of 16th (Queen’s) Lancers, with George acting as best man.

The Wyndhams celebrated the occasion more lavishly on their return to Clouds with a vast tea for Milton’s and East Knoyle’s inhabitants, with a band playing from the terrace, a cricket match for the adults and a bag of sweets and a bun for each child.

When George and Sibell made their first visit as newlyweds, the villagers followed the still fairly widespread tradition of intercepting their carriage and replacing their horses with eighty men who pulled them up the driveway to Clouds themselves.

While on honeymoon in the Italian Lakes, George received a telegram from Arthur Balfour. In March 1887, Sir Michael Hicks Beach, Ireland’s Chief Secretary, had resigned, citing cataracts that had left him nearly blind. The grounds for resignation evoked those of Sir George Trevelyan, Cavendish’s successor, whose hair turned completely white within twelve months of taking the job, and who resigned a year after that, pleading to be released from a post that was, in his words, ‘not a human life at all’.

In a shock appointment, Salisbury now chose his favourite nephew to fill the vacancy. Balfour’s appointment provoked incomprehension at Westminster and jubilation in Dublin: ‘We have killed Cavendish, blinded Beach and smashed up Trevelyan. What shall we do with this weakling?’ taunted the Irish crowds.

So startling was Robert Salisbury’s decision that it has prompted the suggestion (probably incorrect) that it gave rise to the popular phrase that suggests when ‘Bob’s your uncle’ anything is possible.

Now Arthur asked George to join him as his private secretary. Citing the Wyndham tradition of public service, George cut short his honeymoon and hotfooted it back to ‘throw my lot in the political boat’.